Diving off the blocks

When I applied to college, women weren't admitted to Harvard College. Girls who wanted a Harvard education had to apply to Radcliffe College. The ratio of Harvard students to Radcliffe students in the class of 1979 was set at 2 1/2 to 1, having been allowed to rise gradually from the 4 to 1 ratio of a few years earlier.

In my sophomore year, one of my roommates asked if I could swim. She had been talked into swimming intramurally for our dorm, Quincy House. The student who talked her into it, whom I'll call K, had been a competitive swimmer in high school. To swim intramurally, K needed to put together a team of four (for the relay), all affiliated with  Quincy House. She already had three: herself, my roommate, and the secretary to the House "Master". The latter two weren't serious swimmers and hadn't swum on a team. The Master's secretary wasn't a student, but the powers-that-be had declared her eligible, to help us get to four.

While I like to swim, I wouldn't say that I'm good at it. Not only had I not swum on my high school's team, but I hadn't even realized my high school had a swim team (it didn't have a pool).

K took me to the pool to try to teach me what I needed to know. I wasn't successful at learning the butterfly. I think we eventually decided I'd be the one to do the crawl. 

K told me I'd have to dive off the starting blocks. I climbed up on the block, looked down at the water, and said, "No way! I'm afraid of heights. I can't do this." K tried cajoling and berating me, but neither one got very far with me; I can be quite stubborn. She resigned herself to letting me dive from the pool's edge.

We probably didn't do very well at the swim meet, but we had fun. It was nice that Quincy House was represented at the women's swim meet.

Quincy was one of the largest Harvard Houses. If we could barely scrape together an intramural women's swim tean, I wonder what the other Houses did.

In my senior year, I saw a call for female swimmers for intramurals, on a Quincy House bulletin board. In a fit of nostalgia I decided to take part, thinking that I'd be doing a good deed by helping them put together a team of four.

To my surprise, a ton of sophomores and juniors showed up. I asked around, and was told that these were mostly women who usually swam on the varsity team, but weren't on it that semester due to injuries or other reasons. I was embarrassed by how much slower I was than everyone else.

What changed between my sophomore and senior years? The year after mine was the first class with "gender-blind admission" (though the gender ratio took years to equalize, perhaps at least partly because Harvard continued to aggressively recruit from prep schools that were still heavily male). When the Harvard and Radcliffe admissions offices merged, it wasn't an equal merger. Essentially, the Radcliffe admissions office was devoured by the Harvard one. Radcliffe had admitted students almost purely on the basis of academic ability. Harvard College, and then the merged Harvard-Radcliffe admissions office, looked for a mixture of academic and athletic prowess. How heavily they weighed athletics hit home for me when I compared my tall, strong, athletic teammates during my senior year with the Radcliffe bookworms in the class of 1979 and earlier.

Clueless?

 I was surprised by how many friends and colleagues were getting divorced in their fifties. The reasons all seemed the same. Here's a composite from real conversations, that captures the essence of many of them:

My first contact was with him:

Him: "I was taken completely by surprise. I thought our marriage was fine."

Later, I ran into her:

Her: "The marriage had been going downhill for a long time. For years I told him that things needed to change or I would leave. I told him what I couldn't put up with. He wouldn't listen. It was as though I were talking to a wall."

The next time I saw him:

Me: "You said you were completely surprised. But she says she's been telling you for years that there were problems, and that she would leave if things didn't change. Are you saying that's not true?"

Him: "No, it's true. But she never left, so I didn't believe her."

I'm reminded of this when I think about some of the reactions to women who point out things that are illegal or problematic. When the media paid a lot of attention to a story about sexual harassment by a Berkeley professor, someone worriedly told me, "But Alice, a lot of what he did were things many of us have been doing for years."

I wanted to say (and I should have said), "Yes, we've been telling you it's wrong and should stop, but you wouldn't listen."

I'm continually astonished by the willful cluelessness of those who say "If only you had said something sooner, we would have done something about it before it came to this!"

We did say something. Over and over. (Some of my own examples are in the stories I've been posting.) We tried every possible way to tell you.

We tried being polite.
We tried being direct.
We tried being subtle.
We tried being angry.
We tried being professional.
We tried pleading and crying.
We tried being funny.
We tried being witty.

They (you?) told us we were prudish, or uptight, or overreacting, or stupid, or nagging, or lying, or crazy. They (you?) were dismissive or angry.

Some of the "surprise" at this year's protests against racism and police brutality toward Blacks strikes me as a similar kind of cluelessness. They (you?) didn't realize that the U.S. has a long history of racism? They (you?) didn't notice the years of discrimination, segregation, police brutality, protests, riots, media reports, books, and other writings that came before?

Is such cluelessness innocent and harmless, or has it been part of the problem? And what should we do about it?

How I won a tennis trophy for losing a chess game

Only three ninth-graders showed up to compete at the chess meet for junior high school kids from Queens in 1972. There were lots of seventh- and eighth-graders.

The two ninth-grade boys played each other in the first round. The winner advanced to the second round, where he played me. Other kids gathered around to watch us play, and teased my opponent about how embarrassing it would be to lose to a girl. That wasn't fun for either of us.

I lost the game.

We had to wait while the seventh- and eighth-graders went for a few more rounds. Meanwhile, the judges declared me the second place winner for the ninth grade.

I was about to tell them that we needed to use the third round time period for a runoff between me and the loser of the first round, to decide who really deserved second place. Then I hesitated. Wasn't that the job of the loser of the first round (if not the judges themselves)? It dawned on me that he might not want to risk the humiliation of losing to a girl; he'd rather finish third, and tell his friends that the judges cheated him. I rationalized that if he was too dumb or egotistical to ask for a third round, it wasn't my job to help him. I said nothing, and I've felt terribly guilty about it to this day.

If I remember correctly, the awards ceremony (for various sports, not just chess) was some weeks later, in the evening. I had to walk up on stage so the judges could hand me a rather large trophy. They apologized for the fact that the statue on top was of a man swinging a tennis racket---they didn't have any chess trophies so they gave me a tennis trophy instead. I averted my eyes when I passed the boy who got the third-place trophy.

A few weeks later I received in the mail a little engraved gold plate stating that Alice Silverberg had won second place in Queens in ninth grade chess, with instructions on how to glue it to the trophy's base. My parents and I weren't able to pry the "first [or was it third?] place in tennis" plate off the base of the trophy, so we glued the chess plate on top of it.

When friends asked me why there was a tennis player atop my chess trophy, I told them the story of how I won a tennis trophy for losing a chess game---partly as a funny story, and partly to shame myself for my bad behavior.

When I was a kid, I enjoyed playing chess with my older brother's friends. At first they thought it was cute, and they were happy to be the older and wiser teacher. But as I got better and started to beat them, they enjoyed it less. They didn't like losing to a much younger girl, even if it was only on rare occasions. 

I quit chess in high school. It wasn't fun to play with boys who felt it was humiliating for a boy to lose to a girl, and who got annoyed with me if they lost.

(revised December 28, 2020)